What Once Was Quotes

#1. Perhaps that same concept applied to people as well. Did we love them more when we knew their full story? How they came to be who and what they were? Or was the mystery what kept us coming back for more, slowly enticing us, knowing that once the truth was out, the appeal would be lost?

Amber Lynn Natusch

#2. I was kicked off a record label and didn't get picked up again. It was devastating at first because I thought, 'Oh my God. My career is over. What's gonna happen? What am I going to do?' Once I got that I could have a career, a very good career, without having a hit record, then I changed.

Thelma Houston

#3. When I first read 'The River,' I had theories on what it was about, but once we got into rehearsal, I realized it's much simpler: It's about how human beings try to connect. The play holds a mirror up to the audience, and they take from it what's relevant to their lives.

Laura Donnelly

#4. Now I know what it's like to be a rock star. No, I didn't sleep with 5 groupies at once. But I was interviewed about 45 times in 5 days in 3 cities.

Tony Visconti

#5. I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was ... an arctic wilderness.

Steve Martin

#6. A psychiatrist once told me early in treatment, "Stop trying to make me like you," and what a sobering and welcome smack in the face that statement was. Yet somehow, every day of my life is still a campaign for popularity, or better yet, a crowded funeral.

John Waters

#7. I was told by a girl once that I should teach a course on how to kiss properly. I thought that was really a nice compliment. I then asked her what she thought about my sexual prowess and she recommended I talk to a guy she used to date. Body blow.

Dane Cook

#8. Obama sees himself as such a huge change that he can be cautious about other societal changes. But what he doesn't realize is that legalizing gay marriage is like electing a black president. Before you do it, it seems inconceivable. Once it's done, you can't remember what all the fuss was about.

Maureen Dowd

#9. Caroline smiled and waved and blew kisses to both of them as she exited the building. But once outside she felt sad and let down, like the party was over and it was time to go home. And yet she remembered her promise to God. She was going to trust that he knew what was best for her.

Melody Carlson

#10. It's like painting the same blank canvas over and over and over and over and over. Once the concept is known, you don't need to see two. And that was in the back of my head, that I was really done artistically with what I had created or pastiched.

Steve Martin

#11. And if redemption was self-serving, coming as it did ribbon-tied to what he wanted most in life? For once, Akiva's shame wouldn't rise to the bait. He wanted what he'd always wanted, and he'd better just say it, his own worries and fears be damned.

Laini Taylor

#12. In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling.
All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and so proved it. She was like a sea anemone
had only to be touched once to adhere to what touched her.

John Fowles

#13. What I wasn't expecting was the euphoria once my body began releasing endorphins. The mixture of pain and pleasure was ecstasy. Getting my tattoo introduced me to secret, dark pleasures. I would always be a marked prisoner, but I was a liberated soul.

Scarlet Risque

#14. Once upon a time, there lived a boy, and he had to risk everything to keep what he loved. But really the story was: Once upon a time, there lived a boy, and his fear ate him alive.

Maggie Stiefvater

#15. Simply having the courage to say senseless things made me euphoric. I was free, with no need to seek or to give explanations for what I was doing. This freedom lifted me to the heavens - where greater love, one that forgives everything and never allows you to feel abandoned, once again enveloped me.

Paulo Coelho

#16. Nature was taking back what had once been hers.

Nevada Barr

#17. Throughout history, knowledge rises and falls, ebbs and flows. What once was known is forgotten again, lost in time, sometimes for centuries, only to be rediscovered ages later.

James Rollins

#18. I had a lovely experience once in Africa working with the UN when a president of a country met me about refugee issues and said 'What do you do?' I said 'I'm an actor.' He replied 'I heard that was a very difficult job and might not be the smartest job to do.' It was lovely.

Angelina Jolie

#19. What was it like out there? Away from the city?"

"Quiet," Gib chuckled. "My neighbor once had a chicken lay an egg that hatched two chicks. That was big news for a year.

Shiriluna Nott

#20. What I had come to love about book club (besides the fabulous desserts and free liquor) was how in hearing so many opinions about the same book, your own opinion expanded, as if you'd read the book several times instead of just once.

Lorna Landvik

#21. As you move outside of your comfort zone, what was once the unknown and frightening becomes your new normal.

Robin S. Sharma

#22. I was told once that I didn't play the Hollywood game, and that's why I wasn't a big star. What they meant when was that I don't go to parties, and when I go to an audition and I don't like the script, they know it.

Sherilyn Fenn

#23. There was no justice in the world, but he had known that ever since the death of his father. The spirits took no part in the lives of men once they had been born. A man either endured what the world sent his way, or was crushed.

Conn Iggulden

#24. Who are you? What do you want?" The black-clad man drew himself up arrogantly. "Once I was called Elan Morin Tedronai, but now - " "Betrayer of Hope.

Robert Jordan

#25. But what do you think, my lady?'
'I think that she must be cruel if she wants to be loved,' Gertrude explained. ' For once a lady succumbs to the man's desire, he rejects her as unworthy of it.'...Was love like a hunger, easily satisfied by feeding? Or did it grow by what it fed on?

Lisa Klein

#26. I have a passion for the name of "Mary," For once it was a magic sound to me, And still it half calls up the realms of fairy, Where I beheld what never was to be.

Lord Byron

#27. For once, I wished I wasn't so broken, so Rhian had a best friend who was strong and not afraid to love, to hold up as an example of what was possible. Instead, I was her excuse that she wasn't being irrational. I was her enabler.

Samantha Young

#28. When I first got into technology I didn't really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important this would be.

Matt Mullenweg

#29. A kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#30. Lady, I have never been a hero, no Ryam Redwyne or Barristan the Bold. I've won no tourneys, no renown in war ... but I was a knight once, and you have helped me remember what that meant. My life is a poor thing, but it is yours.

George R R Martin

#31. When I told my sister, who was a fashion designer in college, what I wanted to do, she said I was crazy. But once I got started, I couldn't turn back. Kimberly Goodwin, Snapping Turtle Kids

Holly Hurd

#32. I once was poor myself. I worked to get where I am today and I've worked hard to spend $100,000 a year on my clothes and I've worked hard to earn $3 million a year. I deserve what I get because I worked for it.

Liberace

#33. I had a bartender friend once tell me about a $14.00 shot of vodka, this was years ago it's probably more now. I thought that was crazy. From what I understand, vodka has no taste. I think people like the taste of their money.

Ian MacKaye

#34. Once it was his hard-earned money that had been used to buy her freedom. How could she speak against his doing something with what was his for another in need?

Elizabeth Yates

#35. What was once the language of secrecy is now the language of power.

Sarah Dunant

#36. The whole point of diaries is that other people find them and read what you've put. I did once take to writing my inner thoughts on the computer at the end of other things I was writing and ended up faxing four pages of hideous stuff to my accountant so I don't do that now.

Helen Fielding

#37. Pescatore marveled at the seascape. It gave him vertigo. The wind deployed cloud formations. The sun seared the Moroccan coastline. He had read a line once about "the lion-colored hills of Africa." Were they lion-colored? What color was a lion exactly?

Sebastian Rotella

#38. What good does it do me if Christ was born in Bethlehem once if he is not born again in my heart through faith?

Origen

#39. When you stir up the passion, your faith will allow God to do amazing things. If you want to remain passionate, you cannot let what once was a miracle become ordinary.

Joel Osteen

#40. Time and time again, throughout the history of medical practice, what was once considered as "scientific" eventually becomes regarded as "bad practice".

David Stewart

#41. Dizzy Gillespie, the jazz trumpet player, once said, "It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play." He was one of my special ones. And he was quite correct. Silence enhances music. What you do not play can sweeten what you do. But

Mitch Albom

#42. Now I'm reading an old article on San Giovanni a Carbonara, where it explains what the Carbonara or Carboneto was. I thought that there was coal there once, and coal miners. But no, it was the place for the

Elena Ferrante

#43. The cost of oblivius daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realigment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual.
It was difficult to come back.

Ian McEwan

#44. You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn't care. I guess that's what's scariest: not caring about the loss.

Douglas Coupland

#45. In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.

Wesley Hill

#46. I told you once that [our marriage] was like an adolescent's dream of what marriage should be like. That hasn't changed.

Ronald Reagan

#47. It was not a question of knowledge ... but of alertness, a fastidious transcription of what could be thought about something, once it swam into the stream of attention.

Susan Sontag

#48. While Dmitri, as the leader of Raphael's Seven, could not accept such a weakness, the mortal he'd once been, the one who had loved a woman with a wide mouth and eyes of slanted brown ... that man understood what it was to love so deeply it was a kind of beautiful madness.

Nalini Singh

#49. Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer Said once about the long toil that goes like blood to the poems making? Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls, Limp as bindweed, if it break at all Life's iron crust Man, you must sweat And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build Your verse a ladder.

R.S. Thomas

#50. I wanted to know what it was like to lie next to a warm body, to feel close to someone sincere because sincerity is one of those rare human qualities that feels a bit like discovering a lost treasure. It is a rare commodity but once found, is absolutely priceless.

Fisher Amelie

#51. He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition.

Haruki Murakami

#52. People change and needs change. So what was Sufism once is Sufism no more.

Idries Shah

#53. Mars, we know, was once wet and warm. Was it home to life? And what can living and learning to work on its rust-colored surface teach us about the future of our own planet, Earth? Answering those mysteries may hold the key to our future.

Buzz Aldrin

#54. I once wrote a book on courage and what made people courageous. I found it was a strength of belief matched by a strength of willpower.

Gordon Brown

#55. While my college had done an excellent job recruiting me, I had no road map for what I was supposed to do once I made it to campus.

New York Times

#56. When it was time to talk about Warcraft we took our time, we knew what the story was going to be, we had a field general in Duncan Jones. Same thing with Godzilla, we kind of measured twice, cut once.

Thomas Tull

#57. Once I could persuade these guys that all I wanted to hear from them was what they did - Tell me what you do - once you can persuade someone that this is all you're after, you can't shut them up because we're all fascinated by what we do.

Roger Angell

#58. I think what Vincent wanted was for me to find him in his words, even between the lines. Then he wanted me to write him a story he could live in just as I had once told him I might.

Elizabeth Stone

#59. Please look at the imperfect human being God gave to love you once, and try to like me a little for what I really was, or, God willing, am. Then please, darling, become an imperfect human being among imperfect human beings again."
"Jenny

Kurt Vonnegut

#60. I head someone say once that passionate people live violent lives. At the time I didn't really get it but if what they meant was the way love waits in ambush traps your well trained sense of control and tortures you into a confession you'd just as soon not make I now understand.

Jay Kopelman

#61. Don't get yourself killed."
"I'll do my best," said Kell, and then he was going.
"And come back," added Rhy.
Kell paused. "Don't worry," he said. "I will. Once I've seen it."
"Seen what?" asked Rhy.
Kell smiled. "Everything.

V.E Schwab

#62. A wise man was once asked what was the most difficult truth in life to uncover. His reply was: 'to know thyself'.

Jean Sasson

#63. I was vaguely aware that people used to hijack planes to Cuba. But I didn't know much about how often it happened and what the motives were. I started looking into what was going on back then, and I was blown away by how common hijacking once was.

Brendan I. Koerner

#64. Tsukuru couldn't fathom what this substance was. He couldn't accept or reject it. It merely settled on his body as a shadowy swarm, laying an ample amount of shadowy eggs. Then darkness would withdraw and twilight would return, bringing with it the birds, who once again slashed away at his body.

Haruki Murakami

#65. Do not dwell on what once was, but rather look forward and ponder how you can make the future brighter

Christopher Paolini

#66. My first book is really comparable to what I do now, where it's pretty surreal and strange at moments, but that being my first book - I wrote that when I was 22; it came out when I was 24 - and it was just really overwritten. I just didn't trust myself as a writer to say something once.

Joe Meno

#67. The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what was there to look for in dying for good and all, as he was now?

Ray Bradbury

#68. I think once I made up my mind that I was allergic to alcohol, and that's what I learned, it made sense to me. And I think it was kind of pointed out that you know if you were allergic to strawberries, you wouldn't eat strawberries. And that made sense to me.

Betty Ford

#69. Once I knew what it was to rest upon the rock of God's promises, and it was indeed a precious resting place, but now I rest in His grace. He is teaching me that the bosom of His love is a far sweeter resting-place than even the rock of His promises.

Hannah Whitall Smith

#70. But what do you believe? I don't just mean religion. What are you sure of?"
"That once I was not and that now I am. That one day I shall no longer be.

P.D. James

#71. Hard as nails Stacy Killian was one like one of those Tootsie Roll Pops - hard shell, soft, chewy center.

Once a guy knew the center could be chewed, that's what they did. Chewed you up and spit you out. Or swallowed you, bite by bite. Goodbye respect. Goodbye self-esteem.

Erica Spindler

#72. It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

Susan Sontag

#73. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?

Iain M. Banks

#74. Once someone asked me, "What do you want to be your epitaph?" So I said, "Paulo Coelho died when he was alive.

Paulo Coelho

#75. Once in high school, I completely over plucked my left eyebrow all the way up to where you're not supposed to. I had no idea what I was doing and it looked terrible! My mom was like 'What did you do to yourself?' I was so embarrassed.

Ashley Tisdale

#76. And even though he enjoyed being around her, he resisted her,
because he was supremely aware that he wasn't the old Robert any longer; he was Bit, a piece of what
he'd once been.

Suzanne Enoch

#77. Nike used to be known as Blue Ribbon Sports. What's now Sara Lee used to be Consolidated Foods. And Exxon was once Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. These were name changes that worked. But for all the ones that do, there are 10 or 20 that don't.

James Surowiecki

#78. What had once been grand houses were divided meanly into many small apartments, let at prices out of all proportion to what wages it was possible to earn. Rooms were sub-let, and sub-let again, so that what constituted a family had long been forgotten.

Sarah Perry

#79. Once you free your mind about the concept of harmony and of music being correct, you can do whatever you want. So nobody told me what to do, and there was no preconception of what to do.

Giorgio Moroder

#80. Once you see the entertainment world from both sides, you really get a greater understanding of how it all operates. As an actor going into screenwriting, I was able to understand what type of dialogue feels natural and what an actor could actually say.

John Francis Daley

#81. Maybe I'm stupid. Maybe I'm just as evil as he is by keeping my mouth shut. But he told me once that I was different. And I can't help but hope that me being different is the one thing in this world that can save him from what he fears the most ... Himself.

Lauren Hammond

#82. Gansey had once told Adam that he was afraid most people didn't know how to handle Ronan. What he meant by this was that he was worried that one day someone would fall on Ronan and cut themselves.

Maggie Stiefvater

#83. Pray don't go into similes, Margaret; you have led us off once already,' said her father, smiling, yet uneasy at the thought that they were detaining Mr. Thornton against his will, which was a mistake; for he rather liked it, as long as Margaret would talk, although what she said only irritated him.

Elizabeth Gaskell

#84. We are distressed by the unilateral actions of those provinces that are clearly determined to redefine what our common faith was once.

Peter Akinola

#85. In the last week I felt her withdrawing. What was once everywhere, an ocean I imagined myself to be drowning in, was now barely deep enough to bathe in. I saw her warmth draining away and I couldn't stop it.

Olivia Sudjic

#86. It was the moment I realized what music can do to people, how it can make you hurt and feel so good all at once.

Nina LaCour

#87. I'm not patient at all. I avoid writer's block by writing. I power through with a bad version, so I can move on, and usually once I've gotten to the next scene, I'll discover what was missing from the bad version scene. Then I can easily rewrite it to get back on the right path.

Anders Holm

#88. Hope replaced fear. Light subsumed darkness. Strength, born of the power of this presence, mingled with Kathryn's own determination and reordered the last of her mangled body and soul, realigning them into all that she had once been.
What she would now be was once again an open question.

Kirsten Beyer

#89. Acquaint thyself with God, if thou would'st tasteHis works. Admitted once to his embrace,Thou shalt perceive that thou was blind before:Thine eye shall be instructed; and thine heartMade pure shall relish with divine delightTill then unfelt, what hands divine have wrought.

William Cowper

#90. Once I opened a book, I felt compelled to finish it. I was drawn into a world, and I had to know what would happen, how it would end.

Marissa Moss

#91. What else am I missing here? What's in this for you?" "You." Ben was honest for once, and it seemed to work, making Maddox stop mid-laugh and wiping the smart-ass expression off his face. "You're in it for me. I don't do relationships, you're right. But I do you. And I want to try this with you.

Annabeth Albert

#92. Once you've ruled out the impossible then whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. The problem lay in working out what was impossible, of course. That was the trick, all right. There was also the curious incident of the orangutan in the night-time.

Terry Pratchett

#93. Everybody had to conform, find a mold to fit into. Doctor, lawyer, soldier
it
didn't matter what it was. Once in the mold you had to push forward. Sussex was as helpless as the
next man. Either you managed to do something or you starved in the streets.

Charles Bukowski

#94. What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself

Lewis Mumford

#95. But time soon passes. Even the deepest pain eventually loses its edge in the more vivid reality of the present; then, what once was unbearable becomes strangely familiar. And after much familiarity, it assumes the insignificance of just another milestone, ever marking the journey to higher ground.

N. Maria Kwami

#96. I think once you have children, you just don't have the same kind of freedom to pick up and go. But then, I sort of think, how often did I really do it? How spontaneous was I really? Part of what I think I miss is this fantasy of my wild days, but they never existed!

Brooke Shields

#97. were often in a similar boat. Jane knew what I was once,

Anne Bennett

#98. I believe Ronald Reagan can make this country what it once was ... a large Arctic region covered with ice.

Robin Williams

#99. I once blurted out that I found it impossible to bond with my son Winston because I was too tired. I mean how bloody awful does that sound? What a tosser!

Laurence Fox

#100. The greatness of man is so evident that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is nature, we call in man wretchedness
by which we recognize that, his nature being now like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his.

Blaise Pascal